Update from Doug and Beth Wright

Dear family and friends,

THANK YOU for praying! I picked up an exhausted Doug. Grizzled beard, "fragrant" after days of travel, and hungry. Oh, and his suitcase arrived the next morning. Due to the original flight out of Wilmington being canceled a month ago, somehow all of Doug's return flights were a mess. A stressful mess. In addition, he just made the mission's plane in Bunia DRC by 5 minutes, to find out they had made a booking error (booked him into the DR Congo twice, with no return out of Congo!). They fit him in anyway somehow. Then there was a housing adjustment again in Entebbe Ug, and when he went to check in for his international flights (Entebbe-Brussels-Philadelphia...), his reservations on all legs had been canceled!! With the gracious help of a Ugandan employee, Doug was able to restore all the return flights... and he's home. And by this weekend, now rested and recovered. This has had everything to do with God's grace and many prayers for him. THANK YOU AGAIN FOR PRAYING for him!

Gratefully,
Beth

Here's part of Doug's final trip report:

Through God's grace and the faithful prayers of many, the Logo team and I have much to be thankful for after my 8 Oct - 7 Nov consultant trip to DR Congo. The 20 working days were divided equally between the Central Sudanic Discourse Workshop at Muhito (near Bunia) and a Logo translation checking session in Isiro. Here are the highlights:
1. At the C. S. Discourse Workshop, I gave presentations and facilitated the work of the six teams for three days. All six teams, working with their assigned consultants, discovered much about the structures and functions of their languages especially at the narrative discourse level. The Logo team and I discovered and documented about 15 rules for telling stories more naturally. These rules will be of great help when we do final polishing of the gospels (narrative genre).
2. The Logo team and I completed checking of the first 8 chapters of Romans. Although the quality of the first draft had suffered due to inadequate time for the team to prepare between my previous visit and the workshop, we were able to bring the translation up to publishing quality. We dealt with a number of key theological concepts like justification "God's putting us straight (just) before his eyes", redemptive sacrifice "Jesus' sacrifice given by God to buy us back from sin", and being controlled by the Spirit "walking by the power of the Spirit". We have now first-drafted 82% and consultant-checked 80% of the N.T. and we are exactly on track with the plan (revised two years ago) to finish translation by the end of 2012 with publication by the end of 2013.
3. The team and I updated the translation plan, including a planned visit by Adara and Madrakele to Todro in January to coordinate reviewers' committee checking, do community tests, collect more natural texts (including hortatory/expository genre) and coordinate the literacy workers' plans. My next trip is planned for 4 weeks beginning the last week of February 2011.
4. Aguma, Adara, Madrakele and I all had many opportunities to see God's grace and power at work in our lives and those around us. We continue to see God's Word transforming us, which as Aguma says, it must do before it can transform the Logo people. We were also aware of the prayers of many faithful partners, including more and more Logo believers.